Apple came out with some pretty remarkable numbers in their latest press release.

"the first week of January set a new record for billings from the App Store℠ with customers around the world spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases"

"These milestones follow a record-breaking 2014, in which billings rose 50 percent and apps generated over $10 billion in revenue for developers. To date, App Store developers have earned a cumulative $25 billion from the sale of apps and games."

When I was building Appbot to track my own app reviews I never imagined that a few years later many thousands of apps would be using it, nor that the customers would teach me so much.

Much has been written about wether or not you should worry about your competitors or completely ignore them. A quick Google search brings ups many opinions one way or the other. Every business has its own strategy with regard to this and of course it’s your call.

It’s also widely accepted that watching and listening to your customers is critical to building a product that people want. Many of us who are working to create products and services people love in order to build sustainable businesses, spend a lot of time and money getting feedback from potential customers.

When we do it right listening to our customers helps us to find our difference. It’s a lot easier to refine your product to more closely align with what customers want if you know what they want. And it’s a lot easier to fill the gaps that your competitors are leaving wide open by listening to their customers.

The Internet has given us all this golden opportunity to listen. Your customers are showing and telling you what they want and your competitor’s customers are showing and telling you how to be better by leaving reviews.

"In some product categories, over 60% of their users turn off push notifications. In others, a mere 20% do. That’s a huge difference when we’re talking about the primary method of retaining and engaging your mobile users. Recent data from Kahuna reveals that push opt-in rates vary widely across industries – ride sharing being the best performing, and social being the worst. Here’s a comprehensive look at the state of iOS push opt-in rates, as well as a roadmap for getting back on track if your app is trailing behind."

I was recently discussing app names in the App Store with a fellow app developer. I'm not talking about that awesome 4 letter name with no vowels that you spent three weeks debating and looking up domain names. I'm talking about the name you choose to show at the top of the app store.

Only Apple knows exactly how the search algorithms work, but it's widely agreed that the app name gives us the opportunity to sneak in a few more keywords and help sell our app.

Really interesting report came out recently about developer economics.

Key takeaways for me were:

"Third party tools are a critical part of successful app businesses. There’s a strong correlation between tool use and revenues, the more tools a developer uses, the more money they make."

67% of mobile app developers primarily target consumers and 11% target professionals directly. The 16% of developers who target enterprises are twice as likely to be earning over $5k per app per month and almost 3 times as likely to earn more than $25k per app per month.

I've been very lucky throughout my career to have a lot of flexibility in where I work. I've tried everything from a few days a year to full time from home.

I'm currently in my third stint in working from home the majority of time, and I think I've finally started to get the hang of it. My perspective is as a developer with kids, but many of the thoughts below apply to any situation.

I was recently reading the fantastic book Running Lean by Ash Maurya and then did a great startup bootcamp with Pollenizer. Both preached the values of the lean canvas to model your product or business.

When using the tools to create a lean canvas like spreadsheets and pieces of paper I found them frustrating and clunky.

I've been an iOS dev for 5 years and have always managed to avoid Android, until now. But believe it or not it's actually a lot of fun, and not that big of a jump from iOS development.

Here is a bunch of things I learned building 7 Minute Workout for Android, I hope you find them useful. Note that not everything I compare below is an exact match and it's not a complete overview of Android developent, but it does cover everything I learned building a simple app.